The big news in Python/XML in December was the checking in of ElementTree into Python's standard library, which means the package will be part of Python 2.5. The python-dev summary has a good account of the move. I'm surprised it took so long. Even though I've been involved in at least one ElementTree versus 4Suite battle (I also wrote the earliest and possibly only comprehensive treatment of ElementTree), I've always appreciated that ElementTree's relative weightlessness makes it a decent option for Pythoneers who really don't care much about all the intricacies of XML and just have to reluctantly deal with a mess of angle brackets. That's the sort of library that ends up in the stdlib, and for good reason. And for sure, developers have needed a stdlib alternative to SAX and DOM for ages.
A very useful side effect of this move is a step towards merging PyXML
into Python SVN, and eliminating the _xmlplus hack that was used to
have PyXML installs shadow the stdlib originals. XML-SIG has argued
about this for years, but there was never a stimulus for anyone to
actually get something done about it. To quote from my article "Gems
from the Mines: 2002 to
2003".
In early 2003] Martijn Faassen kicked off a long discussion on the future of PyXML by [complaining about the "_xmlplus hack" that PyXML uses to serve as a drop-in replacement for the Python built-in XML libraries. After he reiterated the complaint the discussion turned to a very serious one that underscored the odd in-between status of PyXML, and in what ways the PyXML package continued to be relevant as a stand-alone. Most of these issues are still not resolved, so this thread is an important airing of considerations that affect many Python/XML users to this day.
Congrats to Fredrik on this culmination of his hard work. And here's to the continued diversity of developer options in the very complex field of XML processing.